back to article Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

Microsoft has announced that it is formalising the arrangement whereby Windows 10 inexplicably swipes a chunk of disk space for its own purposes in the form of Reserved Storage. The theory goes like this – temporary files get generated all the time in Windows, either by the OS or apps running on the thing. As a user's disk …

  1. Paul Herber Silver badge

    7GB? That's almost an armfull!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Devil

      All that telemetry needs enough cache space, when it cannot be transmitted at once...

      1. just_me
        Black Helicopters

        > All that telemetry needs enough cache space, when it cannot be transmitted at once

        You are more spot-on than you may realize. There are already temp spaces in C:\temp, C:\Windows\Temp, and for each user: %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\Temp. So why would another 'reserved' presumably 'hidden' temp of 7 GBytes be needed?

        Microsoft has repeatedly tried turning on the snoopware/Telemetry despite people using menus and the registry to say 'NO' repeatedly. Even deleting the binaries etc doesn't make the setting permanent - because... "They're ba-aack" (this is with Windows 7, 8, 8.1 - with Windows 10, you have already signed up to the beast and have 'the number of the beast tattooed(hidden) on your forehead - JK,.. maybe). The most recent time with Windows 8.1, if you allowed the install of the 'update' that re-enables Telemetry, deleting the patch will not turn it off/disable it. It also looks like part of Telemetry has been inserted into Windows File Explorer - it make a lot of weird connections to file shares, even if you aren't using Cloud services - see "netstat -aon", cross check with process id numbers (tasklist). This occurs shortly after start-up and logging on.

        1. Psion1k

          I suspect that the difference here is that unless the space is exceeded, it will show as +7 GiB USED space, permanently, regardless of how much of that space is actually in current use. If this is the case, Pre-Allocated may be a better description than Reserved.

          So:

          Free Space = Total Logical Drive Capacity - Reserved space

          e.g. for an empty 300 GiB drive with the reserve on it, the free drive capacity would be:

          293 GiB = 300 GiB - 7 GiB

          Not a bad idea of itself, especially if it can be reserved on custom drives etc.

          1. Psion1k

            This was confirmed in the comments section of the MS page by Craig Barkhouse [MSFT]:

            "The idea is NTFS provides a mechanism for the servicing stack to specify how much space it needs reserved, say 7GB. Then NTFS reserves that 7GB for servicing usage only. What is the effect of that? Well the visible free space on C: drops by 7GB, which reduces how much space normal applications can use. Servicing can use those 7GB however. And as servicing eats into those 7GB, the visible free space on C: is not affected (unless servicing uses beyond the 7GB that was reserved). The way NTFS knows to use the reserved space as opposed to the general user space is that servicing marks its own files and directories in a special way."

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          "There are already temp spaces in C:\temp, C:\Windows\Temp, and for each user: "

          I think you misunderstand what they're trying to achieve here. Its not about about the 'Temp' directory, its about the volume that these directories are stored in. Currently the various Temp directories live in the shared C:\ drive which can be filled up by users storing loads of files in say, My Documents, My Music, My Photos, etc which all live on the same physical volume.

          By creating reserved storage, they're trying to protect the parts of file system used by the operating system from the impact of the user exhausting the machine storage capacity.

          (eg what happens when someone fills "/" and/or "/tmp" in Unix, resulting in the system hanging)

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Yeah, Android and Google data slurping fanboys voting you up. Oh the irony or is that hypocrisy?

    2. Citizen99

      'ow much ?!

  2. Crisp

    I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

    That's less than 1% of my primary disk space. I think I'll live.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

      I had to help out a family friend reset their "new" (< 9 months old) laptop over Christmas. It was a 3.4GHz mobile-i5 (quad-core with hyperthreading), 8GB RAM, and a 14" full-HD screen, so ostensibly quite a capable machine for most. Except when you realised it was supplied with a 128GB M.2 SSD - which shouldn't be too bad. However, after you installed the 1803 update for Windows 10, there was under 50GB free - this is with nothing but Windows 10 on the laptop (no Office, no documents, etc). Thankfully, replacing the SSD is trivial (the manufacturer even has a guide on their web site), and a 500GB-1TB M.2 SSD can be had for about £70-£120 ...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

        Just run disk cleanup, click the 'system files' button (or whatever it says); tick the box for previous Windows installations, run, and enjoy your disk space.

        Admittedly, disk cleanup needs to be automatic, or prompt the user... Some UX thought required there I guess.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

          "Admittedly, disk cleanup needs to be automatic, or prompt the user... "

          Not again, please not again. Some of us are old enough to remember when it was "automatic". Bored enough one time, I replaced the broom and pan with shovel and shit, never went back to default. At Win 2K, the party ended with such modifications (rightfully).

        2. FIA Silver badge

          Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

          Admittedly, disk cleanup needs to be automatic, or prompt the user... Some UX thought required there I guess.

          It is for previous Windows installs. They dissapear after a couple of weeks or so if you don't rollback.

        3. aqk
          Windows

          Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

          Admittedly, disk cleanup needs to be automatic,

          WHAT??? NO! Heaven forbid!

          El-Reg weenies don't like this "automatic" stuff! Particularly automatic updates!

      2. John Roberts

        Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

        Try enduring the pain of updating an HP Stream with a 32GB eMMC "SSD". Nearly impossible to strip down the shipping version of Windows to get enough free disk space for the feature update.

        1. Byron "Jito463"

          Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

          ----------------------

          Try enduring the pain of updating an HP Stream with a 32GB eMMC "SSD".

          ----------------------

          Just had to do that myself recently for a customer. I ended up freeing the needed space by uninstalling the games that came preloaded with 10. Prior to that, he had 517MB free. After that and the 1809 update, got him to over 7GB free. Go figure.

          Good job, MS. Good job.

    2. joeW

      Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

      First they came for my gigabytes, and I did not speak out because I have terabytes...

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

      >That's less than 1% of my primary disk space. I think I'll live.

      Do you have a big house? Mind if I come and live in your hallway? You'll barely notice I'm there.

    4. MarkElmes

      Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

      Damn an 8tb primary drive must be slow compared to an SSD!

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

        Damn an 8tb primary drive must be slow compared to an SSD!

        My new (employer-supplied) Dell laptop with an SSD and Win10 is much slower than my old (employer-supplied) Dell laptop with a conventional drive and Win7. "Much slower" as in building one project takes around 170% as long, on average, on the new one, compared to the old one. That's with multiple runs on both machines, and otherwise idle.

        What SSD giveth, Win10 taketh away. And then some.

    5. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

      lucky you with the 8Tb of storage on a windows box. for those of using VM's, this could pose a real problem.

      1. muhfugen

        Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

        Funny because my Windows VM templates are well under 10GB each. I really have no idea how the people in these threads have no idea how to install Windows from a Microsoft ISO instead of the bloatware riddled vendor supplied disk, and to remove unnecessary feature installers, or the uninstallation files for updates.

      2. Psion1k

        Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

        "for those of using VM's, this could pose a real problem"

        The method used to allocate the space appears to be a reservation made in the NTFS file table mechanics, rather than a physical allocation. This means that if you are using thin drives, they get no bigger than usual, and thick drives are all pre-allocated anyway.

        There should be difference, other than the used space REPORTED on the drive being 7 GiB higher in the VM OS. There is no physical difference on what is layed down on the disk, so this should look pretty much the same as usual to the hypervisor and its storage.

        ---

        How this works was confirmed in the comments section of the MS page by Craig Barkhouse [MSFT]:

        "The idea is NTFS provides a mechanism for the servicing stack to specify how much space it needs reserved, say 7GB. Then NTFS reserves that 7GB for servicing usage only. What is the effect of that? Well the visible free space on C: drops by 7GB, which reduces how much space normal applications can use. Servicing can use those 7GB however. And as servicing eats into those 7GB, the visible free space on C: is not affected (unless servicing uses beyond the 7GB that was reserved). The way NTFS knows to use the reserved space as opposed to the general user space is that servicing marks its own files and directories in a special way."

      3. JJKing

        Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

        Holy crap, I just had to Upvote bombastic bob. I think I had better have a sit down for a while.

    6. Byron "Jito463"
      Facepalm

      Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

      --------------------

      I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

      --------------------

      8Tb? So you have a 1TB hard drive?

    7. aqk
      Pint

      Re: I think I can spare 7Gb out of the 8Tb I'm using for storage at the moment.

      Hey! 75 DOWNVOTES! (so far)

      The Android and MAC weenies really don't like you! You must be saying something sensible!

  3. JDX Gold badge

    At the risk of not being utterly negative about MS, this seems fairly sensible to me. Except that of course it means those running 32Gb SSD tablet-PC things are screwed (and I actually have used one of those quite happily in the past). It seems like Windows could use a bit of logic to realise that if your disk is tiny, the amount of temp files and other dross is likely to be smaller.

    1. JetSetJim

      pfft, that would mean starting to think in the direction of doing something properly. can't see that happening

    2. ACcc

      I can see your point, except that with already short space on the system drive for OS and Apps (using a micro-SD card for files, pics etc.) on my little tablet, even before Windows now reserving a third of it, trying to update Windows required an external USB drive to store all the extra download files for Windows update.

      Which Windows then failed to pickup on the reboot install and basically got itself stuck in a bootloop of 'Cant' find drive' - can't boot - 'Can't find files'.

    3. Tom 38

      Those 32GB eMMC devices are atrocious. My missus bought one about a year ago*, a HP stream 11 from Currys, to use as a simple lightweight device to take to meetings and so on, to read MS office documents and do minor editing, browse the web etc. After installing her Office365 sub on it, it then used all the remaining disk space to download required updates, at which point it had no space to install the updates (in fact, I had to delete things to get all the damn updates just downloaded). You can't expand the storage at all, you can't download updates to an attached external drive, you can't even use it as doorstop because its too light.

      It took me about 8 hours of fiddling, uninstalling things to get enough free space to install updates, tweaking pagefile sizes. The only way this thing is usable is if you don't actually use it for anything. Only 2GB of RAM, so constantly swapping too, which didn't help matters much. Utterly unusable POS - and Currys are still selling them! After a few months of watching her struggle to use it when it was working, and at least an afternoon a week for me fixing each time it did run out of space, I bought her a proper Dell laptop.

      * With no involvement from me. She insisted she didn't want to spend more than that (comes with a year of Office365) and wouldn't take it back. I wanted to take it back for a full refund on the basis that it wasn't fit for purpose, given that the sales droid guided her to this particular model and said it is what she needed.

      1. Philippe

        32GB HP Monstruosities

        There is a special place in Hell for manufacturers offering laptops with 32Gb of eMMC and 2GB of RAM.

        They share the space with lawyers, and GDPR consultants.

        1. Dave559

          Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

          The fact that (sort of) netbooks have sort of returned is a good thing in a way, but, yes, they really should have a spec of 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage (possibly 128 GB) as a minimum.

          They have basically taken a fairly good idea and chopped an arm and a leg off. And probably they should at least have a Pentium grade processor, rather than an Atom or Celery. You see them in the shops and if you try to do literally anything on them, they all seem to take several seconds to think before reacting at all, absolutely dreadful.

          1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

            Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities @Dave

            You are aware, of course, that Intel have reused the Pentium name for the low grade processors that would previously been called "Celeron", aren't you?

            But you ought to also be aware that the 4 core Atom-X 64 bit processors can be really punchy little things, capable of doing a lot of work.

            1. doublelayer Silver badge

              Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities @Dave

              The atom is indeed quite a nice processor, just as the quad or octacore ARM chips are. That is to say, when those chips are running something that can run in parallel, they can perform miracles of performance. When they run things on only one core, the performance is fine, but not particularly notable.

              However, atoms tend to be paired with two things that put major restrictions on their utility. Number one is the tiny amount of RAM typically put on the SOC. Most atoms that actually get used have 2GB, and some have 1GB (and people have built tablets with the 1GB RAM SOCs in them; those people are evil). When you take a processor that is somewhat slow and also make it page to use modern GUI applications running on a GUI OS, it can be painfully slow to respond. The second thing is windows. Windows will run fine on more capable hardware, but it is not lightweight enough for the atom. If that is the only thing that runs, it will probably work fine, but users of windows intend to run multiple applications because this looks like their laptop or desktop. When they see how slow the thing is, they try to use web applications instead on the theory that the heavy lifting can happen in the cloud. This, of course, means that they're now trying to run chrome on an atom processor and the 1GB of memory left after windows used some, and that's a recipe for disaster. Lighter browsers will run, but not with many tabs or script-heavy sites.

              Running Linux on one of these is better in some cases, but a GUI Linux is still going to use up a bit of memory. These things usually only have a bit of memory, so that can still be very limiting. In general, a Linux user is probably more likely to know that the thing can only run two programs at once and stick to that, meaning that a Linux user will probably be more satisfied with it than would a windows user, but the windows user could similarly run only two (or one depending on size) program and use the thing. For most use cases, neither option is particularly useful.

              1. Palpy

                Re: 32GB HP and Linux GUI

                "...a GUI Linux is still going to use up a bit of memory."

                Yes, but XFCE uses only 100 MB, and LXDE uses about 85 MB. Yes, they can look dated, depending on tweaks and whatnot, but they're functional on low-end bargainware. Of course it varies. Win10 uses what, 1 GB or a bit more at idle? My box shows 1.1 or 1.2 GB on a fresh boot with nothing open except dumb old Task Mangler.

                1. doublelayer Silver badge

                  Re: 32GB HP and Linux GUI

                  "...a GUI Linux is still going to use up a bit of memory."

                  "Yes, but XFCE uses only 100 MB, and LXDE uses about 85 MB."

                  At the risk of starting a which window manager debate, neither of those is really used that much. You could do a lot of things to get a distribution to exist happily in a gigabyte or two, but most users will want a reasonably modern window manager that they already like. You could also have a Linux installation on one of these that is predominantly CLI*, but that wouldn't appeal to many users even though it would have no problem with the memory limits. In order for that to work, you would need to run not only the desktop system, and a relatively new one at that, but also a browser and libreoffice simultaneously. That doesn't need a lot of resources, but it can still use up enough memory to make the atoms slow.

                  *a CLI Linux on an atom: I did this with an old atom tablet that someone wanted to throw away. It has a whole gigabyte of memory in it, which put a lot of limits on what I could comfortably do with it. I assembled a Debian distribution for it that stays in CLI unless I manually launch a GUI, in which case it will use Mate. That works for some use cases, though it mostly sits in a cabinet so who can say if the effort was worth it.

                  1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

                    Re: 32GB HP and Linux GUI

                    "ou could do a lot of things to get a distribution to exist happily in a gigabyte or two, but most users will want a reasonably modern window manager that they already like."

                    Let's put this in context. I have a little MSI netbook which I upgraded to 2G, all it will take running an elderly Linux Mint. It's not running XFCE or LXDE. It's running full fat KDE 4. I'm sure KDE 4 can be skinned to look fashionably fuggly but I stick to an old-fashioned classic look, not too dissimilar to W2K. Processor is N2600.

                    With KInfoCenter and LibreWrite open (on a blank document) it has 40% physical memory and 100% swap free although disk cache will eat into that as it's used. It's also running an instance of a real RDBMS engine, Informix, because one of the things I bought it for was research in libraries etc. where I could quickly know up a table or two & a form to record stuff.

                    The disk, of course, is much bigger than that in this thread - 320Gb - but then (a) I never got round to completely throwing off W7 and (b) it's still largely empty.

                2. dfsmith

                  Re: 32GB HP and Linux GUI

                  By default, Linux is reserving more than 35GB on one of my partitions. I could change that but... ooh squirrel! (dumpe2fs -h /dev/md1 | grep Reserved).

                  1. T. F. M. Reader

                    Re: 32GB HP and Linux GUI

                    @dfsmith: dumpe2fs -h /dev/md1 | grep Reserved

                    It's a safety measure. Linux always reserves 5% of the disk space to allow recovery if the disk is "completely full" (i.e., 95% full). If your disk were 100% full for any reason then chances are you wouldn't be able to delete files as those operations would need some temporary space...

                    1. This post has been deleted by its author

                      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

                        Re: 32GB HP and Linux GUI

                        "So it’s fine when Linis reserves space but not ok when MS do it."

                        What's Linis?

                        Linux, like any other Unix-like OS and like any sensible OS, protects itself against rogue processes attempting to eat the entire disk space* or, indeed, being driven into a corner by manglement who wouldn't invest in sufficient disk. Unix is fundamentally a multi-user OS; it also provides for protections such as disk quotas if you think you need them.

                        I've no idea whether MS does that or not. This, however, is something different. It's making a provision for a future process to download huge** updates by reserving the space that might be used in the meantime simply to avoid that future process checking available space when it comes to need it. I'd label that as passing the cost of failure to the customer.

                        * I've seen that happen in the past.

                        ** 7Gb? Really? Like any other Linux user I've never seen more than a fraction of that get downloaded for an update. Even a full install with loads of applications you might or might not need fits on a DVD.

            2. Dave559

              Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities @Dave

              Yes, I know that what are currently called Pentiums are not higher-end CPUs these days, but I thought that they still came (just) above Celerons in the powerfulness stakes, or is that not the case? I sort of arbitrarily suggested Pentiums as a more usable entry level, as I do actually have a (current era) Pentium laptop and it is both reasonably nippy and has quite impressively good battery life, being reasonably energy efficient. Maybe an i3 might be better for someone wanting to do "real" work, but that's not what netbooks are really for, and it would rather bump up the price somewhat.

              That's interesting to know that modern Atoms have more oomph than I give them credit for: they seemed adequate (but not especially great) back in the original netbook era, with the lesser requirements of Windows XP or a less heavy Linux distro, but I had assumed that current Atoms would be similarly low powered (in all senses) and would really struggle. Certainly that is what I have noticed when playing with current netbooks in shops, but maybe it really is the lack of RAM for current OSes that is holding them back?

              1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

                Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities @Dave

                The original Atoms were a bit pants, but the current 64 bit ones not so.

                Intel appears to have changed the meaning of the Atom range since first introduction. Initially, they were processors intended to be soldered onto a board (rather than in a socket), but they still needed external logic to create a system.

                Recently, Atom appears to be used as a branding for SoCs.

                The most recent generations of Atom use the same processor architecture as Celeron and Pentium Silver processors, and there are ranges of clock speeds and capabilities available in each family.

                In terms of what they can do, a lot will depend on what you want them to. They will never be good systems for processor intensive operations, but for something that needs a low power processor with moderate performance, they are quite capable. I had a laptop with an Atom x7-E3950 in it, and was very surprised by the speed of the system compared to my (admittedly aging) 3rd gen i5 Thinkpad.

          2. Flywheel

            Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

            I removed Chrome OS from my lowly Acer Chromebook and slapped Gallium OS 2.1 Linux on it. It's (now) amazing what you can do with 2Gb of memory and 16Gb SSD storage...

            1. Col_Panek

              Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

              I bought an original Pixel for $200 and put GalliumOS on it. It's my "new" laptop and I can do anything with it. (Original price $1100). SD card stores my stuff.

          3. jelabarre59

            Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

            The fact that (sort of) netbooks have sort of returned is a good thing in a way, but, yes, they really should have a spec of 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage (possibly 128 GB) as a minimum.

            As an alternative, provision them as "portable X-terminals", keep all your actual data and (possibly) applications on the machine in your office, and use it as a screen/keyboard/mouse you can carry around the house. Maybe eventually set it up to work outside the home. Almost like a Chromebook, but without all that troublesome Googleness.

            It would have worked back when XDMCP was still available, until the Gnome/Wayland folks decided such usefulness should be verbotten.

            1. cynic56

              Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

              That used to work for me twenty years ago on a 56 k line in 327x or VT51 mode. Sure as hell doesn't work now with the huge amount of sh*te that needs to flow down the pathetic Comms infrastructure of Third World United Kingdom.

              Even at work, with much faster Comms, our cloudy world takes an eternity to open a browser or document or spreadsheet - and our laptops have a tidy spec. At home - don't even dream about it.

              Diagnosis: 21st century is FUBAR. Despite technological advances, you can rely on government, greedy monopolies, management and obviously Microsoft to make you yearn for yesteryear.

        2. Tom 7

          Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

          Not everybody photographs every last moment of their lives. I know people who have more photos and videos than they can watch before the heat death of the universe but most people who just do a bit of browsing and emailing can live quite happily in a couple of gigs even if their OS cannot.

          1. JohnFen

            Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

            "Not everybody photographs every last moment of their lives"

            True!

            When I was cleaning out my phone at the start of the year, I noticed that I'd taken a grand total of 11 pictures in all of 2018.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

              >When I was cleaning out my phone at the start of the year, I noticed that I'd taken a grand total of 11 pictures in all of 2018.

              I used to be like that, then I had kids. I take that many of my baby daughter's facial expressions each time she takes a dump.

              1. JohnFen

                Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

                I do have kids.

              2. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

                I used to be like that, then I had kids. I take that many of my baby daughter's facial expressions each time she takes a dump.

                I'm sure that in a few years time when you're in geriatric nappies she'll return the compliment.

                1. Col_Panek

                  Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

                  I've discovered that nobody ever watches home movies of ... anything. Enjoy it live, not through the peephole of a camera. Take a couple stills, and keep the best one.

        3. bombastic bob Silver badge
          FAIL

          Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

          "There is a special place in Hell for manufacturers offering laptops with 32Gb of eMMC and 2GB of RAM."

          Why? Win '9x ran on systems with <128M of RAM and less than 2G of hard drive space... and I think it performed BETTER in most cases than its equivalent in Win-10-nic - or at least that was my perception at the time...

          Funny how Micro-shaft has found a way to bloat their stuff so far out of proportion that it negates the effects of Moore's law, quite possibly with more of a negative than any positive Moore's law could gain back.

          /me points out it was windows server 2003 that was a wakeup call to this, for Win2k server ran acceptably on a 133Mhz Pentium "one" with only 64Mb of RAM on it [used it for testing], but on the same hardware, windows server 2003 was SO piggy it constantly thrashed/paged everything and ran like CRAP.

          I think Micro-shaft should seriously re-think the way they develop software.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

            You can't get any modern OS to run on 128MB of memory and 2GB of hard drive space. Not even a modern CLI-only Linux will exist happily in that*. Yes, things have bloated, and Windows is one of those things, but everything has gotten bigger and uses more resources. Therefore, the 32GB/2GB spec is not sufficient for the use case of a workstation.

            *CLI-only Linux on 128MB ram and 2GB disk: You can run embedded Linux images on this, but that's not the same. You can probably shove a trimmed-down image into those specs, but it will run terribly. Your issue will most likely be memory. Disk space is less of a concern because CLI packages are so small, but it probably wouldn't be that long before that was an issue too.

            1. DuncanLarge

              Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

              "You can't get any modern OS to run on 128MB of memory and 2GB of hard drive space. Not even a modern CLI-only Linux will exist happily in that*"

              Well I decided to try it.

              I downloaded Debian 9.0.6 x64 XFCE DVD#1 and ran the installer on a VM with 128MB of ram and a 2GB drive.

              The installer said that it needed at least 167MB of free memory, although I was given the option to continue and a warning that it may cause issues. So I decided to bump up the ram to 256MB only for the smooth installation. I only installed the base system and standard system utilities plus SSH server. No Xorg or XFCE (that was an option). I allowed the installer to decide its own partitions (one partition was the default choice).

              The HDD space was 46% used with approx 850MB remaining (some of the 2.0 GB was taken for a swap partition by the installer).

              Upon boot the system is using 47MB out of the 256MB ram.

              As I needed a more usable system than a base system I installed these:

              Midnight Commander

              Emacs24-nox

              GCC (plus other needed packages)

              lynx

              So although 128MB ram was too little for the installer to guarantee correct operation I was able to get a system running with 256MB and 2 GB of space that can do some useful stuff. It can browse the web, transfer files, connect to a ssh server (and act as one) and develop python,perl and C.

              I did try to install the bsd-games package however that was not on DVD #1 and I had not bothered adding a network mirror (I could have done so).

              After all that I was left with 565MB of free HDD space. Totally enough to write some text based application code :)

              I just wish I had Adventure on DVD 1. Guess I could add a network mirror or have fun writing my own!

        4. shovelDriver

          Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

          So you're saying it's a reserved space in Hell . . . .

      2. alain williams Silver badge

        More than adequate

        I have a HP stream 11, I use it for when I am travelling, giving presentations, web browsing, word processing, ... There is nothing on it that I don't have on my main machine (or is soon copied there). Cheap: so I won't cry hard if I drop it under a bus.

        Works nicely: plenty of 'disk' space, enough RAM, performs fast enough.

        Maybe I should mention that I upgraded it from MS Windows 10 to Linux Mint.

        1. Ken 16 Silver badge

          Re: More than adequate

          I'm running an old(ish) Acer C720 chromebook with Linux Mint. I did upgrade to 4GB memory but otherwise it still meets my needs. WPS Office is the biggest installed application set.

        2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: More than adequate

          "Maybe I should mention that I upgraded it from MS Windows 10 to Linux Mint."

          That answers a question I asked above. I don't think I'd run Informix DS on it, though. Maybe SE.

      3. I am the liquor

        On the other side of the coin, I'm still getting on fine with a 32GB/2GB Linx 1010B Windows 10 machine that I bought 2 or 3 years ago, as a basic web browsing/email/light office work machine. Admittedly I wouldn't fancy trying to use MS Office on it. LibreOffice works nicely though.

        1. rg287 Silver badge

          Yeah, I've a Linx7 which has done me surprisingly well for bits and bobs over the past couple of years.

          But Windows has managed to get itself into a tizzy on a couple of occasions semi-downloading updates, then getting lost, trying to download them again and complaining there isn't space with me having to go in and clear it all out manually so it's got enough breathing room to work.

          Requisitioning a 7GB allocation for assorted cruft on a device like that is unworkable.

      4. BlueTemplar

        They aren't so bad...

        That's not my experience - I was impressed with the performance of the Asus Transformer I had to use for a week.

        (The USB-B mini ports and the bluetooth keyboard were clunky though...)

        Your issue seems to be that you expected to be able to run the full bloated MS Office on it (and got baited into it).

        For heavy stuff like that you need a Surface Pro - which costs FIVE TIMES MORE !!

        (The right tool for the job...)

      5. anthonyhegedus Silver badge

        A customer of ours just bought one of those crappy £130-odd windows things (this one was a lenovo) ostensibly to use at work. It wouldn't let him install anything (because it only lets you install things from MS's "store"). So no remote support, no antivirus, no browser (apart from Edge). And because it only has a 32Gb storage, there was no room to put their files on. I just ended up telling him it's of no use for business.

        1. davenewman

          It is useful for business. Just install Linux. Forget about Windows.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            I do use Windows on my main desktop machine at home (Windows 7). My work laptop came with Windows 10. I trashed it immediately to get rid of the Lenovo crap and did a clean install. I can spare the space and I might need it at some point. The clean install uses 23 GB.

            I use Linux as my primary OS, and have everything I need installed on it - Window Manager, Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, LibreOffice (all use a fair amount of drive space) plus libraries etc for building packages, Python, Perl and so on. This comes in at 3.7 GB. I don't use a cut down kernel - just a standard 4.19 build, with all the default modules.

            So what the hell does the Windows 10 build come with to need all of that space? I did take a quick look and you can't remove stuff you don't need like you could (to an extent) with older versions.

        2. DRue2514

          The laptop has the 'S' version of Windows installed which is a waste of time. You should be able to upgrade to do a one-time upgrade to Pro for free however. I did this for a similar Lenovo I bought for my mother, although that was a slightly higher spec. With 32GB it probably isn't worth it.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Store is a mode in windows 10, you can turn it off and have full fat windows. You upgrade in the MS Store, it's free and available to anyone.

          So because you didn't know how to support the system, you advised them it's of no use to business.

          Who do you work for again??

      6. John 104

        @Tom 38

        "It took me about 8 hours of fiddling, uninstalling things to get enough free space to install updates"

        Funny. You could have installed Mint on it in about 20 minutes. I did the same thing to my daughters HP Stream and it runs like a champ.

        1. Tom 38

          Funny. You could have installed Mint on it in about 20 minutes. I did the same thing to my daughters HP Stream and it runs like a champ.

          How long did it take you to get Office365 suite running on it?

          Linux is fine for me, its what I run on my laptop, desktop and home servers, but this was for the missus to do MS Office work on. Libreoffice != MS Office.

      7. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        "Those 32GB eMMC devices are atrocious."

        32Gb used to be enormous but software is liable to bloat to fill all space available. I've never looked at any of these things but the obvious question is can you install another OS? It's surprising how capable the old netbooks are when running Linux.

        1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          I still use an original eeePC 701 4G Surf (with 1Gb RAM and a 16Gb Class 10 SD card) running MX-18 when travelling. Takes a while to boot up but otherwise fine for watching movies, email and basic browsing.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          I have two of these old netbooks. One, a Samsung N150Plus, upgraded to 2GB RAM and swapped the 250GB HDD with a similar sized SSD, dual boots Windows 7 (starter...cough) and CentOS 6, and at least under Linux, runs like a charm.

          The other, a Dell Inspiron Mini 1010 - horrible thing - 1GB (not upgradable), 160GB HDD (only upgradable if you're willing to risk permanently destroying it by pulling it apart), bizarre graphics chipset, dual boots Win7 (standard - I installed it myself) and Fedora 27 - which works as well as can be expected for such a hobbled machine. I use icewm as my desktop environment on this one, but it's my general lug-about machine as I got it for the princely sum of £0 so I won't be too upset if it breaks. It also worked very nicely in China dialling a VPN, then using a travel WiFi AP, gave me a slow but usable WiFi that wasn't being filtered by the Great Firewall and had a UK public IP.

      8. schifreen

        Absolutely. A friend of mine has an HP Stream with 32 GB eMMC. With Win10 and Libre Office Writer, the drive is pretty much full. What little space remains, is quickly filled by half-complete attempts by Windows to download updates, which it then doesn't clean up properly.

        Although there's no space to add a proper hard disk to the machine, there *is* a slot for a micro SD card. So I stuck a spare 64 gig card in there, and used junctions and symlinks to point all the Windows Update directories and some other junk there. Last time I checked, it seemed to have done the trick and should last for a while until she has the cash to replace the machine.

      9. Hans 1
        Windows

        Ever heard of junctions ?

        mklink /?

        I use that a lot ... c:\Program Files AND c:\Program Files (x86) link to a folders on a secondary drive ...

        > mklink /j "c:\Program Files1" "d:\Program Files"

        > mklink /j "c:\Program Files (x86)1" "d:\Program Files (x86)"

        Then reboot from a linux usb drive and move the data over, remove c:\Program Files and rename c:\Program Files1, same for sibling ... done ;-)

        Skip all that and install Devuan or FreeBSD!

        1. Smoking Man

          ..Devuan or FreeBSD..

          So it looks like you're no friend of systemD either :-)

    4. Adrian 4

      Tablet-PC things are screwed anyway.

      I bought an Asus Transformer with windows 8.1 on it. Even after a factory reset, it didn't have enough space to update itself to the free windows 10.

      1. nematoad Silver badge
        Happy

        "Even after a factory reset, it didn't have enough space to update itself to the free windows 10."

        Lucky you, eh!

      2. BlueTemplar

        I managed to update mine - had to use an USB key though... through a USB adapter!

    5. redpawn

      I tried

      to make 32GB work with a set top box for streaming for my elderly parents. Spent hours just updating. Gave up and it now runs Mint which streams Netflix just fine without confusing them or popping up update notices. I feel sorry for the technically challenged who get these entry level machines which are not fit for purpose.

    6. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

      I have to confess I did once consider buying one of those "32Gb SSD tablet-PC things". Only because it was a cute gold colour and looked like it might run Ubuntu quite happily. But then I already have three laptops so it would have been a bit superfluous...

  4. big_D

    All well and good...

    But I have a Windows machine currently that has swallowed up 98GB from 120GB total on the drive for the Windows folder, 90GB of that is Windows install files that it refuses to delete*! So 7GB isn't going to be much help there and I don't think people will be happy if they keep upping it to 100GB or so, especially on 120GB or 250GB SSDs, let alone small 32GB or 64GB eMMC drives...

    * In the end I deleted them manually and it seems to be okay.

    1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

      Re: All well and good...

      A real killer is the infernal WinSxS directory which merrily chews up many GBs of storage of duplicated files. In theory the "disk cleanup" process can tidy this, however this often doesn't clear up much beyond a few GB.

      The "disk cleanup" is also not available on servers (Win 2016) without installing the cluster fuck of rubbish that should never be on a server that comes with the "desktop experience" package. However there are workarounds to manually install just the "disk cleanup" application itself.

      1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        Re: All well and good...

        "A real killer is the infernal WinSxS directory which merrily chews up many GBs of storage of duplicated files. In theory the "disk cleanup" process can tidy this, however this often doesn't clear up much beyond a few GB."

        Many, if not all, of those *duplicated* files are actually hard-linked so that the duplicates are avoided. However, naive programs like Windows Explorer mis-report the storage.

        I think a worse case of pointless bloat in Windows is its (default) habit of retaining the MSI for every single patch and application *ever* installed, just in case you wanted to roll back.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: All well and good...

          "just in case you wanted to roll back."

          Presumably if you did it would just roll itself forward again and then some more on the next update.

    2. TRT

      Re: All well and good...

      I remember the old days...

      1.21 Jiga Bytes???!!! 1.21 Jiga Bytes? Great Scott! How could I have been so careless? How am I going to store that kind of data?

      I'm sure that in 2015 terrabyte disks are available in every corner computer store... but in 1995, they're a little hard to come by.

      1. Anonymous Bullard

        Re: All well and good...

        What the hell is a jiga byte??

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: All well and good...

          "What the hell is a jiga byte??"

          One that dances from location to location increasing the wear on your SSD.

        2. ibmalone

          Re: All well and good...

          You'll find out when we hit 88.

          1. Tom 38

            Re: All well and good...

            Where we're going we don't need roads

        3. Stevie

          Re: What the hell is a jiga byte??

          It's what you get when no-one in the film unit knows the proper pronunciation of "giga" or is willing to interrupt the "artist" to correct them. In this case it got retconned in under 12 parsecs by the director and fanbase, just like the Kessel Run flub was.

          For an even more annoying one to the UK ear, listen to DeNiro mangling "Hereford" in Ronin. If I had been Seen Been I would have mugged when asked "What colour are the boathouse doors in here-ford" and replied "Dunno. But in herr-i-ford they are green."

          You aren't allowed to correct The Talent when they are fucking it up, apparently.

          1. MrZoolook
            Devil

            Re: What the hell is a jiga byte??

            To paraphrase DeNiro, Fuck DeNiro!

            1. Stevie

              Re: What the hell is a jiga byte??

              That's not paraphrasing, it's mis-quoting.

  5. Spacedinvader
    WTF?

    7GB?

    So, roughly what my Win7 footprint is?

  6. juice

    So much for competing with Google..

    I mean, I can see the reasoning: having a large lump of space makes it much easier for the internal maintenance/upgrade processes to do their thing. But even so...

    At a glance, PC World is currently selling the following:

    * 16 laptops with 32GB storage

    * 4 laptops with 64GB storage

    * 37 laptops with 128GB storage

    Admittedly, some of these laptops are just colour variants, but the point remains: there's a lot of low-end laptops for sale with very limited storage.

    I very much doubt the 32GB models have enough room to allocate 7GB (or even a subset thereof), and even the 64GB and 128GB models are liable to struggle.

    And while you generally can slap in a micro-SD card or USB thumbstick, making efficient use of this additional storage tends to require a bit of technical knowledge. And you still can't use them for Windows system files.

    Meanwhile, as far as I'm aware, the Chrome OS is restricted to a 4GB partition...

    1. Yorick

      Re: So much for competing with Google..

      There’s enough room on a 32GB drive to hold the OS and install an update? Learn something every day.

      A barebones OS with a few apps and very little data fits on 120GB, can be upgraded, and has some 30-ish gig free after the upgrade - but at 64GB or less I’d expect frequent cleanup work.

      So you’re right. It’ll be tough to compete with Chromebooks. The allure of Windows is the app ecosystem, but without sufficient drive space, that app ecosystem loses meaning.

      Still, nabbing 7GB seems like a good strategy on those smaller drives. If that actually is sufficient to install an update. What happens to windows.old on a 32GB drive?

      I feel like I should try this just to see how it behaves in practice. I feel insufficiently smart about space constrained installs

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: So much for competing with Google..

        I just want Microsoft to shrink the windows 10 install image so it fits on a DVD again. It's 4.69GB now. I cannot see that that is needed. I don't think you can fully set up a windows 10 machine without an internet connection anyway so they might as well produce a slightly slimmer build and download the rest of the components after the install. I have about thirty blank DVDs that I don't need but finding USB drives of sufficient size that I don't mind completely erasing takes a few minutes.

    2. Shadow Systems

      Re: So much for competing with Google..

      It doesn't take THAT much tech savvy to do a right click on the inserted SD card, click Properties, then click the ReadyBoost tab. You can either let it take the whole card for use as a swap file, designate a specific amount of space to dedicate for the purpose, or forget it & click cancel. As long as the card is in the slot then the device will run a little (and I do mean *LITTLE*) bit snappier, but you're correct that it won't let you use it for specific Window file storeage. If you designate half the card to ReadyBoost & leave the other half as user accessible then you can use that other space for files, but it's far easier to just let the machine use the whole card for the task.

      My son's maternal grandmother bought him an el cheapo tablet for his birthday one year & it had SFA for storeage/RAM. I slapped in a 64Gb card, told him never to remove it, & set it to use half for installed files & half for ReadyBoost. It made it run fast enough so that he could play turn based games like Oregon Trail without too much complaint, but any "real time" games lagged so bad he didn't even bother to LOAD them in the first place. ("Am I supposed to watch the intro screen being redrawn Dad? This thing SUCKS!")

      You *can* improve such a low cost, low spec device by cramming in a max capacity card into the slot (the highest capacity the machine will read), then dedicating at least half of it to be ReadyBoost. It won't speed it up enough to make you happy to have bought the thing in the first place, but it *might* stop you from INTENTIONALLY throwing it under the buss & cackling gleefully at it's demise. =-J

    3. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Re: So much for competing with Google..

      I very much doubt the 32GB models have enough room to allocate 7GB (or even a subset thereof)

      I acquired one of those W10 32GB Micro-PCs very cheaply and thought it would be good enough for some lightweight stuff but it only had a GB and a bit to spare with all the pre-loaded crap. While I was trying to figure out what to delete it decided an OS update was good idea. That completely borked it.

      For Windows use I am never going to use anything unless it has a hard drive.

  7. Mage Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    SKY Recording

    1) Reserved 1/2 the disk (it would cache "popular" content from broadcast, a good idea badly done).

    2) If you downgraded a package, prior recordings inaccessible.

    3) If you cancelled completely, then though you can use EPG and watch FTA, you can't replay prior recordings of FTA or make any.

    4) Disc is encrypted.

    I've noticed that Android TV on Sony TV seems to want a dedicated USB storage device and encrypts volume and files, even for FTA.

    MS has some distance to go to be as evil as Adobe, Google, Sky etc.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: SKY Recording

      4) Disc is encrypted.

      "MS has some distance to go to be as evil as Adobe, Google, Sky etc."

      Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the mandatory encryption is forced by DRM.

      1. Paul Shirley

        Re: SKY Recording

        Encryption of HD recordings is a Freeview licence requirement for using encrypted EPG streams on Freeview. It's a semi-clever workround for the legal requirement to not encrypt transmission for free channels, they encrypt the EPG and force OEMs to encrypt video locally.

        If Sony are encrypting SD channels on disk that's disappointing, assuming the licencing hasn't changed much it's not needed.

        Mediaportal doesn't have a Freeview licence and my HD recordings sit there unencrypted. They should have used stronger encryption...

        1. snellasaurus

          Re: SKY Recording

          Do you mean Freesat rather than freeview?

          My understandig was that all broadcasts have to be clear but a flag is set for some content. Any PVR etc that want to be allowed to use the Freesat EPG and carry the Freesat logo etc *have* to encrypt this content if they store it as a recording.

          This is easily worked around with a firmware hack for many non sky Freesat receivers OR you can just use a generic DVB satellite receiver with built in PVR or USB connection for a HDD and away you go.

        2. Mage Silver badge
          Devil

          Re: SKY Recording

          ANY PC with a £12 USB TV stick can record FTA DTT.

          Any PC with a satellite card can record FTA Satellite.

          DRM is OBSCENE. Why should Digital equipment give users LESS than an S-VHS, or HDD recorder or DVD Recorder with an Analogue tuner? Apart from the fact that current over compressed SD content is actually POORER quality than decent reception on Analogue PAL for 4:3 content and sometimes poorer than PAL for 16:9 (even assuming you didn't have PAL+ WS)?

          There is no encryption of FTA DTT or FTA Satellite. The EPG is irrelevant. You do have to pay a royalty to have software that can do the new format text or button accessed streams, MHEG5. Though the streams can be manually tuned.

          You don't need the Freesat or Freeview EPG for recording, you can use third party EPGs updated once a week off internet at worst. Or manually record.

          You can't use the USB HDD on anything else if it's used for the Sony TV recording, an Android TV. (The whole 4K seems a bit fake too as only 24 fps at full 4K and 30fps at intermediate from laptop.)

          1. TRT

            Re: SKY Recording

            It's true it's a pain in the butt. HDMI CP for example. Not present on the hardware for H.232 video conferencing kit, for obvious reasons, but it means all the video switching gear and stuff in between it and the source has to be set the same and it's best to lock the CP settings in memory because one device in the chain gets it wrong and it's black screen o'clock. Macs hate it, and having, say, an Apple TV hooked up so you can watch HD films in the UHD-laser-Atmos-equipped lecture theatre after everyone's gone home... you've got to swap cables around to get it to work.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: SKY Recording

      "I've noticed that Android TV on Sony TV seems to want a dedicated USB storage device and encrypts volume and files, even for FTA."

      Standard to Android, rather than just Sony.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: SKY Recording

      4. Simple incentive to stay with them. Just torrent the things you want to keep and move on from them

  8. Luiz Abdala
    Trollface

    Windows, now with pre-allocated cruft!

    Now you don't need to wait several minutes to get cruft all over your hard drives!

    Windows now pre-allocates all the cruft, all 7GB of it!

    It is just like finding a 7GB %TEMP% folder that you can't empty.

    "So, we predict that Windows will cruft up to 7GB of storage over the average time users get pissed and reformat the damn thing, so we are preemptively nabbing it, so they can't tell the difference!"

  9. johnnyblaze

    So this is on top on Windows already abhorent disk management, whereby the WinSxS folder pretty much keeps a copy of every system file from every update you've ever done, and can grow >20GB itself. Windows will just be an even more bloated sh*tshow now.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Various tmp

    So, is this MS wishing they had already implemented /tmp and /var/tmp ?

  11. gurugeorge

    Pah losers. This is why I only use iPhone. Haven’t opened a PC for years. Someday every PC will be an iPhone. I, sir, can only pray for that day to come.

    1. Alan Bourke

      No it won't.

      For the same reason that the predicted demise of computers hasn't happen. You can't run a business, type anything of any length or play games sensibly on a tiny touchscreen.

      1. Flywheel

        Re: No it won't.

        True, but if you have a physically small device that you can plug into an HDMI screen and USB /Bluetooth keyboard it will work really well. I've done that with a Raspberry Pi Zero.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: No it won't.

          "if you have a physically small device that you can plug into an HDMI screen and USB /Bluetooth keyboard it will work really well."

          True but if you want to take it all with you it's far easier packaged as a laptop.

    2. GX5000
      Facepalm

      LMAO

      Obvious troll is obvious.

    3. MyffyW Silver badge

      If all you do is consume content then an iPhone (or Android phone) might be fine. If you are a creator of content (beyond Tik-Toks, cat videos and certain niche, Arthouse movies) then a real computer will likely be required.

    4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      "This is why I only use iPhone."

      If you want to do serious work on a tiny screen best avoid doing anything that might make you go blind.

  12. JimmyPage
    Linux

    Not a dig at MS, but a question.

    How much disk space does Linux reserve for this feature ?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

      "How much disk space does Linux reserve for this feature ?"

      Depends entirely on how much of your disk(s) you dedicate to it. Some people put everything on one partition, some people separate out *everything* into separate partitions or separate physical disks...

    2. Anonymous Bullard

      Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

      5% is usually reserved for root. So, the users can fill up the disk.. but not disable the ability to log ("hmm, my disk had filled up - but I saw no mention of it in the logs..."), for example - and updates too, I guess... so it looks like Linux has had this feature this for years.

      (it's set by the tune2fs command)

      1. ibmalone

        Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

        Precisely, fairly sensible move from MS, even if 7GB seems a bit heavy, provided you can disable it for extra data discs. What does puzzle me though is the size of a Windows install without any extra software, a Linux system with applications is usually smaller than a standard Windows install. This is a bigger issue for the people on 120GB SSD (and it's usually 120, not 128). Though 250GB and upwards are much more affordable recently, even 1TB is no longer silly money.

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

          "Though 250GB and upwards are much more affordable recently,"

          I just breathed new life into an old laptop with a £40 240GB SSD. Very affordable, well under the price of a tank of petrol.

          1. Anomalous Cowturd
            Thumb Up

            Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

            I have one on the way. £32 for Kingston 240GB. I was amazed how cheap they're getting...

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

      Don't know how much it reserves but I know on at least two occasions I've had to spend an hour or two cleaning up the Ubuntu LTS install on the MicroServer I use as a fileserver when its managed to run out of space during an automated update (probably something which wanted to update the kernel etc which needed to write an updated kernel image) and then continued to attempt and fail to do updates until I eventually noticed. So, my experience is "not enough"!

      1. Andy Non Silver badge

        Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

        "when its managed to run out of space during an automated update"

        I had a similar problem with Linux Mint doing kernel updates if you have whole disk encryption enabled. With that enabled, a limited (unencrypted) space is reserved for the kernel and as it keeps previous versions you can run out of space after a few kernel updates. The solution I found is to manually purge old kernels after applying new ones. It's a pity the kernel update process isn't smart enough to figure out there isn't enough space before applying an update and just bombing out on hitting zero bytes left free.

        The problem didn't occur when I wasn't whole disk encryption as it just takes as much disk space as it needs to keep all the old kernels.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

          "The solution I found is to manually purge old kernels after applying new ones."

          Debian defaults to just keeping current and last. Cleaning up Ubuntu is an annoyance.

    4. Zarno

      Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

      I know that ext3/4 filesystems typically default to reserve 5% of space in case things fill up, so that the underlying root processes can still function.

      I usually turned that off on data storage volumes, or down to 1% on system volumes.

    5. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

      It doesn't quite work like that. The kernel almost always lives in a separate, and not usually very big, partition /boot I have a 200M partition on this Devuan box. Debian and Devuan only keep the current and last kernels by default - others differ. There's also a partition, /tmp, that gets purged at boot - 1G on mine.

      It's also very, very advisable to set up the area that stores home directories, where all your work etc. lives, on a separate partition. This enables you to reformat the entire rest of the disk and reinstall for a major upgrade and leave the bits you care about untouched. On my main laptop this is 500Gb (of a 2Tb disk) and 60% full.

      Swap space is also separate - as it's also used to store a copy of memory to hibernate it needs to be at least the same size as physical memory although I prefer something bigger.

      This is all minimum partitioning I'd suggest. The rest is up to personal preference. You could leaver everything else in the root partition; some installers seem to leave everything, including home directories, in root (some installers, be default put everything in root which is a crap thing to do).

      A better plan is to have separate /usr and /var partitions. The former is relatively static stuff - program and library code. The latter is more volatile including another temporary directory, spool area (files queued for printing, etc.) and, in the case of Debian and friends, files downloaded for updates etc and these can be purged if more room is needed. I have a 20Gb /usr, 59% used and a 10Gb /var, 58% used. Cached update and install files amount to a little over 4G.

      I also have /usr/local and /opt for other S/W not installed from the distro. They're 8Gb 4% used and 20Gb 10% used.

      The root partition also contains some program binaries and libraries - stuff that might be used when the other partitions are unmounted. Mine is 4G but only 16% full. As someone mentioned elsewhere a Unix-style system is restricted so that only root is allowed to right to a partition more than

      I could easily get by with a smaller disk with fewer partitions but this scheme avoids nasty surprises if I take my eye ofd things. Another thing that avoids really nasty surprises is that Unix-style OSs only allow root to write to file systems more than, sy 90% or 95% full. In practice routing OS updates are small and quickly applied so they don't provide surprises anyway but having spent a good chunk of my working life looking after Unix servers that occasionally have had ballooning overnight jobs I do like the degree of control this gives me.

      There's one other factor in play here: I manage the disk with LVM (Logical Volume Manager). It means that currently a large part of the disk is uncommitted and I can use this to increment any partition - or even add new ones - over the life of the machine.

      By comparison my little lightweight netbook uses eighteen and a half Gb including over 6 Gb in my home directory.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

        A lot more in-depth advice is found in the Multi Disk HOWTO. A bit old but the points are mostly valid.

    6. The Central Scrutinizer

      Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

      Not sure, but I've never had an issue. Mind you, I do manual updates. Linux doesn't force them on you.

      My whole Mint installation plus the applications I need/want currently takes up about 11.8 gig of space and that includes one big mother of an app/ecosystem.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "We may adjust the size of reserved storage in the future based on diagnostic data or feedback."

    and FUCK YOU for thinking we should ask you first.

  14. Cxwf

    WinSXS

    I had reason to look up what the winsxs folder was doing the other day when I noticed my (work provided) virus scanner getting stuck in there. Most of the files in winsxs are actually links, not real files, but set up with some special kind of crazy link that tricks windows into THINKING that the files are in two places at once. So both the original folder and the copy folder include all those files in their space estimate- but there’s really still only one of them.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: WinSXS

      WinSXS was never the same after Michael Hutchence died and they got that new singer in, though.

      1. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: WinSXS

        I always liked their song "Original Simm".

        1. David 132 Silver badge
          Happy

          Re: WinSXS

          "Elegantly Wasted Drive Space"

    2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: WinSXS

      "Most of the files in winsxs are actually links, not real files, but set up with some special kind of crazy link that tricks windows into THINKING that the files are in two places at once."

      They are called hardlinks, and can be very useful. It seems the people in charge of the underlying file allocation/free space counting API at MS didn't get the memo and how to read the flags and identify when a file is "real" and when it's a hardlink.

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        Re: WinSXS

        I'm not sure how Windows does it, but on UNIX and Linux with most of the common filesystem types (ufs, extX etc.), the system cannot tell the difference between the original file and a hard-link to it (in fact, there is no difference, both directory entries point to the same i-node in the same way, the system does not even record which link was made first as the dates on a file are stored in the i-node, not the directory entry).

        The only thing that anything can tell is the number of hardlinks to a file.

        It can also be difficult to identify where other (hard) links actually are in the filesystem without doing a file tree walk. Sometimes ncheck (if it is installed) can be used, but this utility, dating back to ancient UNIX is often not installed on a system (or may not even be present).

        Of course, Windows may do it differently (as do some of the more advanced filesystem types on *nix), I just don't know as I don't really follow Windows that much.

  15. Stuart Halliday

    Blame software installers (including Microsoft) for not bothering to correctly delete their temp files for the last twenty+ years.

    Looks like the Shite has finally hit the fan.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    keep the users away from the system disk / partition

    it is good practise to keep the users and their profiles away from the system disk / partition. We did this over 40 years, with all system we used, even with windows. But with one windos 10 upgrade, MS wanted all this mess on system disk.

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: keep the users away from the system disk / partition

      I can't say I agree there. For servers or systems where the profile could be loaded on multiple devices, that is required. When using a single device in a standalone configuration, however, you will only have the one disk in there in the vast majority of situations. So the data will need to be on that one unless you want to try having a removable media device such as an SD card permanently installed to store that data. I don't recommend that. You could create a new partition that stores user data, but that's just asking for a situation where the user has used all 96 GB of their space and would like to use some of the 16 GB free space on the 32 GB OS partition, but can't. The alternative is valid as well (it doesn't have to be as a result of system bloat; maybe they do want to install extra OS functionality that uses a lot of disk, such as large databases such as those in some foreign language packs. Manually resizing partitions is a pain that may not be needed when the disk is fulfilling a single purpose.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: keep the users away from the system disk / partition

        "that's just asking for a situation where the user has used all 96 GB of their space and would like to use some of the 16 GB free space on the 32 GB OS partition, but can't."

        The proper cure for this is a bigger disk. One of the reasons for having separate a separate user area is to avoid the situation where the user - or Microsoft - has trampled all the free space.

        "Manually resizing partitions is a pain"

        Ah, the joy of LVM.

  17. luke@getyouonline.co.uk

    Paging file?

    Correct me if I am wrong here but couldn't this all be integrated into the existing paging file system and just set to a static minimum size instead of the "let windows manage this" up and down that no one in their right mind actually uses anyway. thus allowing us to move this "Required" storage to secondary drives with ease and resolve this issue in a simple manor? I mean come on Microsoft ask your users and we will tell you how to apply common sense to your world in a number of different ways most of which will give the same sort of end result before you make random changes without thinking them through please!

    1. Fading
      Thumb Up

      Re: Paging file?

      Great idea - any thoughts on the odds MS will allow the user a measure of control over this? I'd happily set aside a few 10's of gigs of space on some spinning metal for a temp folder - don't particularly want to lose 7 gigs from my 256 GB M2 drive.....

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Paging file?

        "Great idea - any thoughts on the odds MS will allow the user a measure of control over this? I'd happily set aside a few 10's of gigs of space on some spinning metal for a temp folder - don't particularly want to lose 7 gigs from my 256 GB M2 drive....."

        According to article, you can specify a reduced size, though not all the way down to zero. How that user choice will survive through normal updates only MS knows. I suspect that user choice will never survive an update that is dead set on increasing the max size up from 7GB in the future though.

  18. hellwig

    Windows Needs 8GB to Install these updates....

    I had to track down and find all kinds of rogue files on my HP 2-in-1 to clear up 8GB on the 32GB internal storage. Not sure why they now think they only need 7GB for updates, temps, etc...?

    The one thing Windows needs to fix is their f*cking SxS (side by side). That system is NOT as efficient as they think it is. Also, make it easier to purge AppData and ProgramFiles, I found 6GB of crap in AppData stored by an application I long ago uninstalled.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Swap files eating my disk

    With machines having so much RAM to play with today you have to wonder how much scratch space is really needed on disk outside of a big database, video editor or DAW. As annoying as losing 10% of your 250MB disk to swap space was on Win3.1, there was at least justified reason for doing so!

    Then again we are also in an era where a PDF reader ranges from under a meg up to hundreds of megs. I'll take the former, thanks.

    Windows 10 was promised to be the last version of Windows - even though it has a stated end of life. Might as well start making moves towards it's successor: My crystal ball says MS buyout of Canonical. Reserved partition == /tmp ?

    IBM have just gobbled Red Hat. MS will be after Canonical to keep up. Never say never!

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Swap files eating my disk

      "As annoying as losing 10% of your 250MB disk to swap space was on Win3.1, there was at least justified reason for doing so!"

      What does Windows do about hibernating? Linux copies the memory to the swap space and then switches off. It means you have to have enough swap space to do that although you can do without swap altogether but then you can't hibernate.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Might help if Windows didn't assume the whole world is "C:" .... had to help out my sister and brother-in-law recently as his disk was full as he stores scans of all the artwork he produces (he's a freelance artist) ... and they wondered what they should do - but then asked what the thing called "D:" that showed on windows explorer was - turned out he had a 1TB HDD to complement the much smaller SSD on his laptop that was still completely empty. So quick phone description on how to copy from one drive to the other and delete original (after the necessary "you do have a backup somewhere don't you? - just 'in case'" and fortunately got an affirmative answer).

    1. Spazturtle Silver badge

      Windows does understand that C is not the whole world, the issue is that Windows expects it to be set up by somebody competent.

      You can set the user storage folders (downloads, desktop, documents, pictures, and music) to be in a different location including on a partition or disk. This way when users save to My Documents it will save it to the D drive.

      You can change the location of Program Files and Program Files (x86) to a different partition or disk, you can move the paging file and hibernation files as well. You can also change the drive which Windows uses to store updates whilst they are installed, I assume with this new feature that will also change which drive the pre-allocated storage is on.

      It's best to do most of these before the User has even started using the computer, especially the documents and program files ones. But you can change it and move stuff manually later if you want to.

      So back to your case, the issue you had was with the OEM or the shop not configuring sane defaults, they should have set documents and program files to be on the D drive before your friend even started using the computer. In this case it wasn't Microsoft who are at fault, they provided the configuration options needed, it's just that the OEM or shop didn't use them.

      1. LenG

        Changing programme files location

        This can be done via a registry hack but MS does not support it. Early versions of Win10 allowed it from settings but then it got greyed out and last time I looked I couldn't find it at all.

        1. Anonymous Bullard

          Re: Changing programme files location

          If I had the misfortune to use Windows, I'd just use symlinks: `mklink /D d:\myshit c:\users\butthead`.

      2. Remy Redert

        You can no longer set your user storage folders to any other drive. Microsoft decided it was a bad idea to let users do that after one of their patches broke any machines with the user storage folder on a different partition.

        You can change where programs install, but you can't change the default /program file/ directory (any more). AFAIK you can still move the paging and hibernation files. For now.

        And of course, all of these were 'advanced user options' rather than 'shit we should check for by default'.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          "You can no longer set your user storage folders to any other drive."

          It just gets worse and worse. I'm glad I don't live there.

        2. Spazturtle Silver badge

          Ok I have just looked, so with the new system you can now only more your user profiles to OneDrive and it has to be configured with a group policy.

      3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        "Windows does understand that C is not the whole world, the issue is that Windows expects it to be set up by somebody competent."

        Every version of Windows since at least 3.0 has a nice slide show during the install telling the user how wonderfully easy and "intuitive" it is to install and use. Therefore, by that definition, all users are competent and getting more so with each new version of Windows because the slideshow keeps telling them it's even easier and more intuitive than the last time.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    For shame!

    I remember when you could install a Linux distro and all your ASCII-art pr0n in 1GB!

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: For shame!

      I remember when you could boot Damn Small Linux off a single 1.44MB floppy and still have space left for ASCII porn!!

      1. David 132 Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: For shame!

        Pffft, boot Amiga Workbench off an 880KB floppy and have room for pr0n in glorious 256 (I think?) color IFF HAM mode. Mutter mutter, uphill both ways in the snow, jumpers for goalposts, mumble mumble etc

        (Yes, I know this is technically cheating because a lot of the Amiga OS was held in ROM. I will never let facts get in the way of a good off-topic ramble.)

        1. Soruk

          Re: For shame!

          Boot RISC OS 2 off a 512K ROM. Desktop is ready to use before your CRT monitor has had a chance to warm up.

  22. jason.bourne
    Big Brother

    Out of sight?

    Will this partition be visible and accessible to Bleachbit and related tools?

    1. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: Out of sight?

      Doubt it, but look on the bright side it will almost certainly be visible to "carefully crafted browser scripts" where stuff can be written to it in user mode and get actioned/executed in system mode...

  23. BGatez

    Since I need software that only runs under Windows (currrently Ver 7), when I do need a new machine I will buy the Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB version as it seems well worth it to dodge the crap storm.

  24. Balcom

    Must agree with Tom38 and Philippe,

    Ran a Stream 13. It was always slow updating, even pre 1803. Simply not enough eMMC space or RAM. Out of the box ,the OS alone took up 17+gB out of 32.

    Files moved out to a microSD card and cCleaned regularly, especially after any OS & anti-virus updates.

    I thought about trimming winSxS, but it looked a bit daunting so I bootled out. Whether that made any difference I don't know, but in mid-update last

    September with 4.5gb to spare, & after 2.50 hrs, it re-booted and failed. "Can't find C:" Out of 12 month guarantee and only repairable by HP.

    The only motherboard failure I've had in over 30 years. Burn't out by an update!

    1. DreamEater

      The consumer rights act is your friend here.

      I think it’s reasonable a computer should last between 3-5 years

      1. Remy Redert

        It's unreasonable for a vendor software update that you can't avoid to break anything.

      2. DuncanLarge

        "I think it’s reasonable a computer should last between 3-5 years"

        Unless it comes from Apple, who seem to not know what a computer is and have shocked their loyal fans when they said that "PC" users are to be pitied as they end up with machines that are 6 or more years old!

        https://ifixit.org/blog/7998/sad-apple/

  25. JohnFen

    No need

    "if you're buying a PC in 2019 and considering disk space, remember that as well"

    No need, as the first thing that happens to any machine I buy is to wipe the hard drive entirely and install a different OS.

  26. arctic_haze

    Easy way to regain the 7 GB

    Format everything and install Linux.

    1. fandom

      Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

      How much are you allocating for the swap partition?

      1. ibmalone

        Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

        This is slightly different though, Windows also uses a page file, and while I don't regularly (aha ahahah ahahahah) install it, ISTR last time I did it sets it up automatically meaning that chunk of space is also taken. This is about reserved space for temporary files, a bit more akin to the default 5% reserved for root on a linux filesystem or /tmp on ramfs (but not exactly the same as either, the true linux equivalent would be creating /tmp as a separate filesystem on disc, optionally in a loopback device if you want to be able to resize dynamically).

      2. keithpeter Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

        "How much are you allocating for the swap partition?"

        Thinkpad X61s with 1.5GB Ram and 60Gb ssd with 'full' drive encryption.

        I allocate 1GB of swap and the rest one big linux partition and the unencrypted / partition for the kernel is something like half a gig. No issues, runs well for a laptop manufactured 11 years ago.

        PS: Anyone got a linux going on one of those 32Gb ssd machines?

      3. DuncanLarge

        Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

        How much are you allocating for the swap partition?

        A little bit more than what you have in RAM if you want hibernation or 1GB would be enough otherwise.

        You asked the wrong question. The OP was saying you can reclaim the 7GB reserved for windows, not the space reserved for the pagefile.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

      Zero. Linux doesn't require a swap partition.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

        Woooaahh! The OS fits in RAM??

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

          Of course it does. The bits you are using anyway. Or are you expecting to install the entire OS to a RAMdisk?

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

            "Of course it does."

            I think you just blew his mind.

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

        "Zero. Linux doesn't require a swap partition."

        Or allocate a partition the same size a the RAM if you want to be able to hibernate.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

          You need that for hiberation, but not for suspend to RAM, which is what I use almost all the time. Only if I'm not touching my laptop for about 4 days does it run the battery down all the way (and mine's a 17 incher, others probably get a lot more STR life)

      3. fandom

        Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

        No, but it is recommended

      4. ibmalone

        Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

        I quite like a swap partition (even with lots of memory) for one reason, without it if you ran out of memory (this hasn't happened to me in a while, so might have changed), it was possible to hard lock before the out of memory killer could dump something. A little swap space meant things slowed once they hit the limit and that was enough to allow the OOM kill to work if needed.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

          I solve that problem by having more RAM than I will ever need, since it is a cheap and I don't do anything that uses massive amounts. I could still have a rogue app grab all the memory and cause problems - and that has happened a few times - but I never had a lockup. Just weird errors or the rogue application quitting on its own after a few seconds long lockup.

  27. matt07743

    7gb today ..... 700gb next month ..... 7tb next year ......

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    More annoying is Windows 10 stealing vram

    It reserves a whole wodge of vram on your video card that you can't do anything with - even if there is no monitor connected. Win 7 and Linux don't do it. It's an issue for those of us doing things like 3d rendering on gpu or machine learning stuff. Plenty of people have tried getting them to change it and they have admitted they aren't going to bother any time soon.

    https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/Lync/en-US/15b9654e-5da7-45b7-93de-e8b63faef064/windows-10-does-not-let-cuda-applications-to-use-all-vram-on-especially-secondary-graphics-cards?forum=win10itprohardware

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: More annoying is Windows 10 stealing vram

      ...and unfixed for two years. Way to go Microsoft.

  29. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Progress?

    I remember the Archimedes 420 with a whole 4MEG ram and 20MEG hard drive. Incredibly it ran a very full desktop environment with ease, and seeming plenty of space left both in memory and on the drive.

    1. really_adf

      Re: Progress?

      I remember the Archimedes 420 with a whole 4MEG ram and 20MEG hard drive.

      I may be misremembering but I think the A420 was 2MB RAM and the A440 had 4MB.

      The OS was in ROM though; 512KB for RISC OS 2, including CLI, GUI, and even a BASIC interpreter and ARM assembler.

      The ROM jumped to 2MB in RISC OS 3, but that included the above plus several applications. Among them were a text editor (Edit), and bitmap (Paint) and vector (Draw) graphics.

      (All IIRC.)

  30. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    Is this story connected in any way with...

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/08/reg_standards_bureau_introduces_the_devon_fatberg/

  31. jonfr

    Windows 10 size

    Since I have Windows 10 Professional and this is an upgrade from Windows 10 Home. I have it on 365 GB partition that today only has 130GB free. Since I don't trust the Windows part of the hard drive for anything important its mostly just Windows 10 Pro on it. It still seems that Windows 10 Professional takes up all this space. Windows 10 already has 450MB allocated for a recovery partition on the C drive. I don't know what Windows 10 is using all this space for.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Joke

      Re: Windows 10 size

      "Windows 10 already has 450MB allocated for a recovery partition on the C drive. I don't know what Windows 10 is using all this space for."

      That recovery partition only includes enough to boot the equivalent of wget and show some pretty pictures while it downloads the rest of the "recovery data" from MS.

  32. Efer Brick

    I remember when

    7gb was a lot of money

  33. sisk

    Pre-assigning space for updates is sensible enough, but 7GB? Just how big are Windows updates these days?? That's more space then my entire system minus /home takes up (the less said about the multiple-terabyte mess that normally gets typed as ~ on my system the better).

  34. Kev99 Silver badge

    World's largest purveyor of bloatware

    Remember when Windows came on a handful of 3" floppies? Maybe if they designed the installer better so all the bloatware that's automatically installed becomes user selectable. Make the third party software companies provide their own DLLs instead of installing 50,000 files that no one will ever use unless they install a Printronix printer.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: World's largest purveyor of bloatware

      "Make the third party software companies provide their own DLLs instead of installing 50,000 files that no one will ever use unless they install a Printronix printer."

      That's how you get DLL Hell. There is a reason for providing standard libraries. The real problem comes when the 3rd party vendors decide they can't trust what's on there and provide their own anyway.

      1. sisk

        Re: World's largest purveyor of bloatware

        That's how you get DLL Hell.

        It may just be me, but I'd much rather track down the occasional missing DLL than give up 10GB of storage to DLLs I'm never going to use. Then again I don't use Windows except at work where I'm not given an option.

  35. Slipoch

    What about when the temp files bork windows?

    I imagine MS is going to secure this so users Cannot delete temp files. This will cause major issues when temp files cause Windows corruptions

    1. ibmalone

      Re: What about when the temp files bork windows?

      ? I'd have thought if you were doing this you'd add expiry dates to temp files to ensure your 7GB always gets cleared out. Otherwise it's a bit pointless.

  36. Delbert
    Holmes

    Optimising swap files really?

    Oddly its not a very new idea, based on fixing the size of the swap file/virtual which memory goes back to windoze 95. Best done at the first install, you deleted all the bloatware ( which was tiny compared to today just unused jpg,install and text files ) set the swap file to zero min and max restarted and defragged. Reset the swap file to 4 times actual memory (er 16 mb) and you had a contiguous swap file freed from the clock cycle stealing dynamic resizing which gave a huge performance hit. Detailed later in Windows Annoyances so doing same for installs is pretty obvious idea if you have a massive harddisk space no so much if you have a measly SSD on a laptop.

  37. ChrisBedford

    With the minimum size hard drive installed in PCs today at 500 GB, if you are within 7 GB of your capacity you have more problems than Microsoft's usage of the disk.

    1. ibmalone

      Only with spinning discs, many lowish end laptops are currently SSD with 128/256GB (usually a bit less depending on manufacturer). 120GB is actually a little tight for windows these days. It also matters if you are using it in a VM. I do agree it's not that much, and provided it's configurable it's not an incredible problem (also if it improves the management of that temp space it may actually be a help, uncleaned temp files frequently run to GB anyway).

    2. Is It Me

      You need to look around, there are still devices running windows 10 with 32GB of storage for sale (further up the thread someone had the time and energy to list the number of different models from PC World with 128GB and under).

  38. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    All your storage is belong to us !

    As in title.

    MS has become evil in more ways than one.

  39. Wargasm

    777 new, better Satan

    Are they going to remotely lock part of my filesystem, no opt-outs? What if some new "update" reserve 7% of processor time, let's say for M$ Coin miner or so and next time 7% extra RAM just because they can?

  40. Christian Berger

    That's insane

    particularly since there hasn't been to much added functionality since the days of when your Windows system still required your system partition to be less than 2 Gigabytes.

  41. Jonjonz

    The Old library bookshelf thing

    Microsoft and allotted disk space are like librarians and empty book shelves, it is inevitable they will fill up all the space.

  42. mark l 2 Silver badge

    I hope this is configurable and can be turned off. I currently have Windows 10 set to dual boot with Linux, with Linux as my primary OS. My Windows partition is about 40GB with just a few programs installed which have no Linux versions and I need to use occasionally.

    I only have about 12GB of free space left in this partition and don't really want to loose another 7GB to the OS which already consumes around 9GB of space on the drive.

    How did we get to the state where the OS needs so much storage space? Windows XP used to fit onto a CD-ROM and could be installed on a 2GB drive. I bet if you installed XP and Windows 10 on the same modern hardware you would get faster boot times and a more responsive system running XP than you would get from running Windows 10, and would still be able to run a lot of the same software.

  43. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Question - can a ne'er-do-well instruct Ickdoze to "increase" this 7Gb to something big enough to take all free space on the disk it currently is installed on, and lock it at that size so it cannot be deflated?

    Going to be a laugh if it is the case.

  44. Jake Maverick

    theft legal now....world wide? :-(

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